In basketball, Baylor Bears not yet the finished product

Sunday

Jan 29, 2012 at 12:01 AMDec 12, 2018 at 9:44 AM

The warts are obvious.

They're young, with first-year players everywhere you look. They don't always protect the ball and sometimes handle it with the same dexterity they would a live grenade. At times, when the pressure gets too hot, they implode like a teenager asking a date to his first prom.

Texas?

No, no, I'm talking about Baylor.

Forget for a second that the Bears (19-2) are off to the best start in school history and are so tall and long that the school could use them for ladders.

The Bears are not yet the finished product.

With a roster full of more freshman than a college orientation seminar, the Longhorns have many of those same shortcomings. But Baylor's not all that much more experienced, with a starting lineup on Saturday that included a true freshman, a junior-college transfer and two sophomores, including one who sat on the Boston College bench for a semester before transferring here a year ago. The Bears committed a ghastly 18 turnovers, leading to 20 Longhorn points.

Down the stretch, Baylor almost appeared as if it were trying not to lose — and was barely successful at that, holding on for a 76-71 win. "We made some unfortunate plays," Bears coach Scott Drew said. "We've been successful in close games all year, but we're not going to win every game. Hopefully we'll keep getting better."

The Bears have talent as far as the eye can see. Lottery-pick caliber talent, too. Baylor has superior talent to Texas at every position but one, and Longhorn junior J'Covan Brown made that clear with his eye-popping, 32-point performance Saturday.

Drew keeps his share of program players as well, the lifeblood of any successful college franchise in the long term. Unselfish guys like 6-10 forward Anthony Jones, who started 73 consecutive games, and point guard A.J. Walton, who made 48 straight starts. Both of those players now come off the bench.

In 6-11 Perry Jones III, Drew has a dynamic player who is to the Baylor basketball team what Robert Griffin III was to the 10-win Baylor football team in the fall. He finished with 22 points and a career-high 14 rebounds, but had a double-double by halftime.

Even as the football Bears won 10 games — an accomplishment that netted them no more an elite bowl game than the Alamo — so might these dribbling Bears be in line for a similarly rewarding but not quite fulfilling conclusion to the season, unless they mature.

Then again, Baylor might be Final Four-bound — if it doesn't get on the wrong end of a referee's whistle, as it did against eventual national champion Duke in an excruciating 2010 Elite Eight loss.

No one knows, but the reoccurring concern about Baylor revolves around its maturity and decision-making.

The Bears were better than Texas on Saturday, but who isn't? The Longhorns fought hard but came up short for their fourth loss in the last five games.

"One game we look like a million bucks," Drew said. "The next one, it's ‘What happened?' There are areas where we've been good and then not so much."

The question remains. Can you trust Baylor? There are reasons not to, and some of them surfaced at crunch time.

"We can play a lot better," said Jones, who will be a top five NBA pick any time he wants to leave school. "We've got a lot of room to grow as a team when it comes to decision-making, defense and definitely rebounding. And we need to work on our effort a lot more."

Baylor's a highly entertaining team to watch, with the ultra-talented Jones, a very skilled 6-9 Quincy Miller, a dunking machine in 6-7 Quincy Acy, and a deep bench. But it's not close to playing as well as it can. Missouri outmuscled Baylor in this same arena, and Kansas pulverized Baylor at the Phog. The Bears' potential has yet to catch up with their vast expectations.

Talented point guard Pierre Jackson all but self-destructed down the stretch. He had almost as many turnovers (five) as assists (seven) and was involved in miscues that led to turnovers by teammates. Two came in the last three-plus minutes, when the Bears almost coughed up the lead.

First, he got confused on an in-bounds play. Worried about a backcourt violation, he threw a wild, behind-the-back pass out of bounds to give Texas the ball with a one-point Baylor lead. Then he threw an ill-advised pass to Acy in traffic that led to an offensive foul on Acy with just over a minute remaining.

Such poor decisions were emblematic of a team that historically can get rattled and lose games it has no business losing. This year, however, the Bears have been very clutch, sporting a 4-1 record in games decided by five points or fewer.

That same 5-9 Jackson did block 6-9 Brandon Davies' shot from the top of the arc to preserve a three-point win over BYU, and hit a huge three-pointer to send the West Virginia game into overtime in December, in another nail-biter Baylor won.

Not only that, but Baylor's six wins over top 50 RPI schools are exceeded nationally only by Kansas' seven. As such, the Bears might hang with the Jayhawks in the Big 12 race, and even steal the title and one of the No. 1 NCAA tournament seeds that the league champion will surely earn.